Every other Thurs you tell your shrink that your life teems with terse one acts and scene changes. There are dress rehearsals with portly make-up ladies holding cylinder lipstick like a toddler holds crayola. There is an irascible goateed director who, with his beret sloped left and his glasses in hand, yells that you've done it all wrong. All wrong. You should have exited stage-right instead of stage left. You forgot a line. A hand gesture. You ad lib'd when you should have just lib'd. Your back was facing the audience. You make a better door than a window. You forgot to do this or that. NO one in the auditorium could hear you again. NO one could understand what you were trying to convey. No one ever fully understands.
"It's called acting, Dav-id," The director reams out your name with heavy accents grilled around both syllables, drawing out the "id" with an inflected nicotine snarl.
"You're a character you're supposed to make the audience feel what the character felt. You are supposed to establish a rapport with the audience. A connection. A bond. Marshall the audience's view of the world. Give them a picture of what is possible."
A picture. A key. Windows 95 and windows 98. Windows hot Key. Stained glass windows in cathedrals. The window to the world. The window to ideas and peace. Your bedroom window that is fissured because you bumped your nose into it when you were like four.
Your voice is an unvarying alloy of vowels and fricatives and, blowing smoke through your nostrils at this part, you reconvene your memory. Dressing rooms with peepholes and donated costumes. The odor of cheap coffee and mold permeating backstage. There are take fives and there are slow motions. Digital re-enhancements. Sound systems. There are microphone check one-two's. Replays and recapitulations. Note changes that are penciled in and then erased after the production.
The Director balks towards you in personal imperatives and after every period you nod your head in congruence and say either 'yes' or 'OK' or nothing at all. You like nodding your head in silence. He tells you once again to work on your entrances and exits. That they are very important. He tells you once again that your semblance is important. Your style. The way people see you. Perceive you. It's not who you really are, that's important, it's what the status quo thinks you are. He tells you once again not to fuck up. You
drop your chin and tell him once again OK.
Bodies 'blunder inside the auditorium in troves and silk-ties. Heels scuffle. Shoulders shuffle. Heads scour East and West along the wharfs of seats searching for a place to dock, a quay to stow emotions and ennui for a couple of hours. They check ruffled ticket stubs. The bowed heads of cushions bend to appropriate bottoms and body heat. They sit down and then stand back up, stretching, adjusting limbs, popping out of their chairs like
toast to wave palms in recognition. Legs cross and recross, finding comfort. You make a point of telling her, your shrink, that much of life is monopolized trying to find comfort in an uncomfortable milieu—one that you didn't audition for and one where there is a paucity of scene changes.
There are house lights which stutter and drown amiss the verbal din of
the audience hushing, whispering, fanning themselves with their programs,
sporadically coughing down into armpits, passing tic-tac's back and forth
between the isles. It is your cue. Someone with a black hand and sheer dress
slaps you on the ass and says either Honey Take One' or 'Have a good one'.
Backstage the only thing that separates you from the peering, ogling eyelids of the audience is the burgundy-hued curtain. In what is either a wisp or a whisper the curtain will fall upwards and, again, you will be coerced into the role, you have, from the outset, been cosigned, to perform. A role that has always made you somewhat uncomfortable.
Her fish bowl eyes and half-cookie smile makes her look like a cross between a jet-lagged flight attendant and something cubist. Her rubicund visage is shaped like a light bulb and provides a perfect match for her outdated haircut and buoy nod of concurrence. She pretends she is interested in what you are saying even when she is not# although she smiles when you say something funny or ironic. A leaning tower of psychotherapy books lie dormant against her desk. Your eyes focusing intently on the constellation of freckles that adorn her forehead as her chin assents, signaling your verbal encomium into the bathos of continuity. As the curtain ascends and apprehension accrues, she will inquire about your childhood, about your family and about your lovers. The audience have now taken their seats and as the first dapples of spotlight hit your viscera you fall deeply within yourself not knowing if you are coming or going; exiting or entering.
A coming. A going. Who knows?
A caterwauling push. A cry. A breath. What next?
After what could either be moments or months of seeping through empty space you crawl into cognizance with a snot-licked face, a bruised forearm and a see-saw smile. There is no before. You cannot remember ever having really given much of a nose-swivel whimper or whiff to your biosphere at all. You are here and you just are. Here. You presuppose ‘here’ lies someplace inside. Most of your life has been spent inside the cradle of a womb or the cradle of a nursery# only you have no cognition of this, you just somehow are here, fastened within an arena of flickering light and grating noise. A confluence of wire and wood, of clicks and plugs, warm and cold. Strangers are always picking you up and setting you down. Adults smile when they hold you and mutter sounds you cannot comprehend. Two larger adults swim around you in a perpetual elbow and wrist frolic. They incessantly urge you to swallow only the provisions they place between to your lips. Often, as so it seems, especially in front of company, one of them
ingests tittles of nourishment between your lips while verbally imitating the gruffed-muffled sounds of some sort of vehicle, shaking the metallic utensil and then applauding at your ingestion. People are always applauding and warbling sentences that you cannot intuit. Your smile is that of a sad monkeys and the plaudits and praise continue as you loll your head slowly like a pitchers wind-up and eventually break in snigger. You are not two years of age and you can not help but laugh. Your tonsils are ticklish. You laugh and you smile and you are touched. Sometimes you feel like you are one with everything and sometimes you water your cheeks with squeals of desolation if you are not. Mostly, though, you just nod in and out being. You writhe in your sleep and although you feel an instinctive proclivity to leer and lurk. You cannot help but coddle yourself in the arms of the two creatures who aggregate around you like protons and neutrons telling you they love you and spoon feeding you like your last name is Gerber. Through all this bosh of bodies and foreign lexicon, you cannot help but feel that your existence is wending forth into a world fraught of absolutes and images and other nonesuch ideologies, none of which you are allowed to comment upon since you are slowly being weaved into a stratum that has long since been woven.
You lay wallowed inside an orbit of emotions and particles. Perhaps you knew all once but now you know nothing. Entering and a exiting. Something has pushed you into a realm of being. Time does not exist. Byes the size of breath mints hover around you and stare. Older ladies with faces like trash bags and lips like twist-ties tell you how so cute you are. So precious. They say the vowel 'oh' over and over, drawn out. You cleave to
your mother's bosom for nourishment.
* * *
Everything is somewhat blurry and tall and swathed in corduroy overalls, lulled and velcroed by maternal sing-songs, buckled in hymns about'Jesus Loves Me' and nourished via dulcet nursery rhymes. Outdoors, past the tufted trees of broccoli in the front lawn, untinted station wagons rove the avenues amiss the din-of disco, the Bee-Gee's and Bell bottoms. You are a curtain of bangs and dimples. Innocent. Taller than a fire-hydrant. You are ( as of last Tuesday) four fingers old now and ( as your Mommy puts it) a “few
french fries short of a Happy-Meal” when it comes to proper decorum and etiquette. But you can do things that other kids can't do. You can Pee standing up, by yourself, with the door closed and with one foot behind your back. You are a "Big-Boy• a "Good-boy•. You have Scooby-doo underoos (which you unabashedly show anybody whether they inquire hither the invitation or not) and you have tackle boxes full of action figures. Star Wars.
The Empire Strikes Back. Solo and Skywalker you keep stowed in your pocket at all times. The Force is' with you. You feel it as you learn. The world becomes suddenly more and less at the same time larger and smaller, lucid and befogged, in a funny way you have not been able to quite put a finger on yet, although you have seriously been thinking about it. You think about it when your Dad mows the yard and gives-you piggy-back rides in the summer. You think about it when you sit in .the splintery church pew all
alone because your parents have gone up near the pastor to take communion. You think about it over sandwiches of Peanut butter-n-Jelly or when you chew fig-Newtons the way a cow chews cud or blow 'Bad Boys' bubbles in your milk with curly straws. You especially think about just how weird everything is in the afternoon in the period which follows your nap. That period is special to you because the sun not only shines through your window, but rather it pours in, bulges and breathes and engulfs your childhood gait. When you are a little kid every moment is almost golden. Or so it seems.
You seem to have known Mom and Dad all your life, for as long as you can remember. Your mother is as smooth as the kitchen floor is after she washes and waxes it. Her features are taut and elbow grease-lanky. She is glass thermometer skinny and kitten paw delicate with a sharp angular chin and Oil of Olay'd cheekbones that are always grinning at you even when the rest of her viscera is not (probably because you have used one of your dad's 'bowling words in the house again ' because you have forgotten to wipe the milk-moustache-which you proudly :flout, chin up-from underneath your nostrils). At times her face looks down at you the way a kite looks down at you in March. Her movements are subtle yet lithely actuated- almost as if she were stringed together with the yellow yarn she knits with. Years later you would tell friends in bars and girls in hotel rooms that your Mom was shaped like a halogen lamp with a bad perm, but for now, she is mom. Your Mother, and she is the closest thing to pulchritude your pupils have yet to
peruse.
You feel like your dad is more on your side than your Mom is, partly because of the time you skipped-n-staccato and farted three times in a row, and on perfect pitch, in front of your Great Aunt Hazel-Marie's casket at her own visitation. No one said anything at first, and then, after a gravid pause, both Dad and the Holy Rev. Morningwood began choking on their chuckles and surreptitiously biting down hard on their Knuckles and soon, just like a flea epidemic, all of the faces in the funeral home shifted from cardboard stolid into ruddy-nose saccharine and even the most sincere and lachrymose of ill attired attendants soon began patting themselves on the back and fanning themselves with the church bulletin's and the Holy Rev. crossed himself after wiping his forehead and mapped his glasses back on his watted-nose and apologized but Mom just stared at you long and hard and then staved her vision off into the casket and wept and the rest of the room, after the moment of levity had been lifted, just all remained silent and ruffled countenance
and pensive and spent the rest of the Good Rev Morningwood epitaph staring down deep into the black's of their shoes.
Your Father is also suspect to not putting away his toys after playing with them. Mom lets him trundle in and out of the kitchen after watching Dallas— leaving a popcorn-bowl here or a beer can there. Which is perfectly o.k. with Dad, who you think smells like Yoda after he drinks with somebody by the name of J. Daniels and then arrives back at his domicile all titzy-witzy and Adam's Apple sozzled. Dad doesn't drink much. But when he does....anyway. Dad can evade your Mother's malice, but you can not.
Although the time you cantered like a newborn colt into the kitchen, all la-di-
da innocent with Solo and Skywalker pocketed deep and you pillaged her kitchen-cabinets to purloin armor, she got royally P.O:d with you and coerced you out to the nursing home and read from the book of Jude to sultry Blind people for a week. But still, your armor! A metallic measuring cup becomes your refulgent crown. The wooden cylinder mom uses to roll dough with serves as both sheath and sword and (although this is top secret classified information) your Jedi Light Sabre!
After you finish rummaging through the baubles and bric-a-brac of your Mother's culinary finest. you potter off into precincts of the living room, thrashing the looming forces of the Dark Side. The enemy hides out in lamp shades, in dark closets and dusty-curtains. The invisible pavilion reconnoiters underneath the Piano bench or on top of the old rocking chair that is shaped like the letter ‘S'. There are enemies burrowed deep inside of the umbrella holder or wrangled in the coat wrack.
The house is viable. It breathes. Like the Death star.
Every portion of the house is still somewhat devious. It has greater control over you than you have over it. You grow dubious over the trinkets that grow inside of your chary abode. All, you feel need, to be scrutinized with pithy curiosity.
Darting forth with surrogate Light Sabre firmly clasped, you hover in and out of rooms. In the Pink Panther colored Bathroom there are sounds that flush and whorl. There are gaped drains; the emergent neck's of faucets which spit out gushing 'lava' water. In your parents bedroom, the merlot-hued carpet becomes a torrent of blood, and you claw and clamber upon their Serta and ensconce yourself in satin-sheets, less you prey victim )
to sinister rivulets incessantly flowing below. In two winks and a quick stop back at the bathroom (one-footed w. one eye closed this time) you’re back inside the kitchen. The oven is an ominous eye that lights up and fringes with diminutive infernos. The cabinets have drawers which jut open and jeer at you. The washing machine prattles and hums like it is stranded in post- coital limbo. In every room of the house there are open-eyes sockets stranded in the wood with sad expressions sliding off their faces, a simple longing to be filled with something, jolted and shocked. There are radiators which yawn in the morning and fart before you go to bed. There are the arrogant-nosed light switches which you flick off and on while they sneer at you. And towering above you like a telephone pole is your dad who then manacles your ankles with his hands and topples you over-above-and behind the neck. All you can do is laugh as all of your intrigue and adventure's become momentarily suspended.
Your face blushes to the color of Kool-Aid and your lips arch into a jelly-stained smile as you capitulate your quest of world household domination to laughter and father-son bondage.
“Help! Help! Let me down " you wheeze, configuring your fingers in a Jedi mind-trick, hoping to cajole a parental whim.
Your father is gaunt man. He is hefty and hirsute. His face is finely featured.
Distinctive. His balloon shaped head bears home to a fertile harvest of unctuous hairs- oily minute candle wicks that sprout-up in patches of side-burns, fallow armpits, flossed between earlobes and strewn down his chest, like a current a tsunami. After he says the word “gotcha” you swoosh between his arms and somersault between his legs. The next sound your Dad will hear will be the clamor of a wooden door shut on its hinges and the dissipation of a four year old lout.
With a quick smirk and titter you look both ways and cavort past the hoi-poloi of Peoria. down the street past the quiescent lamp-posts, the octagon cherries that halt traffic, and the hushed blue mail boxed which litter the streets of America.
"'Hey, it's R2-D2." You say to yourself, not realizing that there is no one else around who can hear you and that for the first time in your life, you, David, four fingers old and shy, are on your own. A world full-of Bigger boys. Boys who wear cuffed jeans and use deodorant. Boys who are in school and pop-wheelies on their bikes. Boys who have long hair like girls and who smoke and play with fire crackers. Boys who play with spray-paint and wear hi-tops and glide on skateboards. Boys with lower voices and who deck their lobes with earrings. Boys who are bigger than you and who could, if they wanted to, kill you.
Out here the boys take notice of the way you walk. Out here freedom lies heavy in the air. It seems to permeate all around you. A tangible gulp. It wisps left to right as you trek across parking lots gashed with broken 7up bottles and prodigal tires. The sodden and sad stained visages of the automobiles all face the same direction and do not move. There is a heaviness that huddles in your chest. It is a heaviness you will feel later on in life. As your vision becomes enamored with the sight of auburn leaves, evergreens which look like the stick figure on the girls bathroom, and the curly-slide whose tongue drapes and dips and eventually licks the chunks of wood heaped below, you begin to hear applause, As you approach the rungs of the ladder and heave yourself up into the pellucid air of both autumn and nostalgia, you become draped by a curtain of some sort and then are weaned back to her chair, your eyes draped-closed like the curtains in your mothers house. Here, your doctor interrupts you by holding out her palm, thwarting a mental bowl of fruit in the still-life portrait of your juvenile- histrionic botched love songs.
First things first, she says as she claps her hands together and looks up into the dun ceiling tile. She wants to know what spawned all this melancholy. All this remorse. She wants to know why you are bringing all this up and why you treat this with cynicism and levity. She wants to know why you think your heart is a twist-tied bag of crushed aluminum cans. She wants to know why you feel severed and truncated, as you put it. Why you use the word Jejune' to describe the last few years, from the beginning ofyour heart's detumescent. You tell her that you could better explicate youremotions to her if everything inside of you didn't feel so much like the dust
bowl.
